Tag Archives: books

I stumbled upon this waterproof vintage My Little Pony book from 1986 called The Sea Ponies Live in the Sea which should really have been the name of their first album of sea shanties. You can click through the link below to see a close-up of all the pages and thus read the entire book.

As a new parent, I’m curious. Is reading in the bathtub still a thing? Do they still make books for the bath?

Do you remember reading about the sea ponies while in the bathtub or pool?

Big massive Thank You to Mark Bellomo for his kind words about Summer Hayes’ My Little Pony books in this interview: http://is.gd/gKJhT

When Sarah Palin made that “unicorn ranch” comment, I was all like the Show Stable in Dream Valley? Democrats live with Lemon Drop? My Little Pony is so rarely a hot button political topic, I feel like we should embrace this. I had no idea Sarah Palin was an MLP gal.

See, I used to collect every generation. I had everything, you would have been really impressed. But then, you know how it is, you buy a house, you don’t have a lot of space, you start to look at your collection and say, “Sure, I love all of this but I also love closet space. What do I love THE MOST.” So I realized that I really, really loved my G1s and wasn’t going to part with them but that the G2s and G3s weren’t really as OMG must have on my list. I started culling the herd. I kept only my favorite G2 and G3 items and sold everything else.

I actually kept more G2 items than G3 because I’ve always loved some of the crazy G2 sets (Babies dressed like bumble bees! Unicorns with silver horns! Male ponies with construction hats! What’s not to love about this stuff?)

But G3? I was buying everything that came out for a while but it was madness. There were just too many coming out and, on top of that, I was keeping them all mint in box so they took up more room than my good ole G1s. Then they switched to Core 7 and it was like, eh, how many Pinkie Pies can one person own? So I still collect the cool stuff (you know, the usual: Comic Con ponies, Fair exclusives, anything that smells like root beer) but I don’t bother with the stuff currently in stores (though I always walk through their toy aisle to check their shelf space because I am a freak).

Then something happened. I got this massive lot of early G3s at Goodwill. I don’t usually buy G3s but they looked lonely and unloved and my inner Hillary was like, “They are still My Little Pony! Who are you to play favorites?” So I bought them.

There are too many. Two waist high boxes of them. It’s insane. There is, clearly, something wrong with me.

But as I clean them up to sell/trade something strange is happening. Maybe its because all I’ve seen is the new style ponies with the big heads and I’d forgotten how like G1 the original G3s were. Maybe its because now I can touch them with my actual hands instead of just looking at my mint in box items through plastic but I’m finding myself totally falling in love with some of them. With every batch I clean, I’m picking out one or two going, “Hmm, maybe I’ll just keep her.” There isn’t any rhyme or reason to this, I’m not doing it based on rarity (or Rarity for that matter ;-)) or collectibility, it’s really more of an organic “OO Shiny!” sort of thing.

You know what I think it really is? I needed the thrill of the hunt. Going to the store and just buying the ponies new wasn’t enough of a challenge for me. I needed to hunt for them, clean them up, have the thrill of finding that pony I wanted in a bag of Goodwill or flea market bait. Now that I’m seeing the G3s in bags of filthy boxes, they suddenly look much better to me than they did in the stores.

I’m trying to keep this urge under control, I don’t want to be that guy that buys back their entire collection after selling it. But as someone who swore off G3s, I’m surprised to find how much I like the early ones on a second glance.

I wonder if this will happen more and more as collectors like me see them second hand and give them a second chance.

I know a lot of people gave up on G3s after they introduced the Core 7 so I have to ask, did you give the early G3s a second look and feel the tiny tug of changing your mind? Or are you done with G3s for good?

PS: Because I have like 9 million G3s, expect a bunch of random G3 posts as I sort through them all.

Montambo is one of the winners of our recent giveaway of the book on Goodreads so she’s set the bar pretty high for future reviewers!

You can enjoy the original review here but in case it gets deleted, I’m reprinting it below for your benefit.

Summer Hayes is a literary genius.

I was planning on reading this, but first I wanted to buy a copy of The Cambridge Companion to The My Little Pony 2007-2008 Collector’s Inventory, so that I understood the manifold literary-historical allusions and the stream-of-consciousness narration.

Jürgen Habermas wrote an interesting essay on Summer Hayes’ oeuvre a few years back in which he posited My Little Pony as a forcible diminution and reappropriation of the male’s psychosexual privilege in Western culture. He further describes an orange, purple-maned, doe-eyed pony as a ‘folding-over-upon-itself’ of the traditional hegemonic phallocentric aggression we find sublimated in our modes of commerce and social exchange. He also says he likes to comb their hair and kiss them before night-night.

I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t note that my favorite work in the Summer Hayes canon is The My Little Pony G1 Collector’s Inventory: An Unofficial Full Color Illustrated Collector’s Price Guide to the First Generation of MLP Including All US Ponies, Playsets and Accessories Released Before 1997, in which she collaborates with the highly underrated Kimberly Shriner, who succeeds in tempering some of Hayes’ most gratuitously high-modern tendencies. Also, this is the first Hayes/Shriner work to address the problematic relationship between accessories/playsets and the notion of subjective pony-selfness which has so confounded post-structuralist thought (see Foucault, for instance); what’s most interesting is that Hayes and Shriner define the All-That-Which-Is-Other-Than-My-Little-Pony as ‘accessory’ and not integral to a symbiotic exchange between subjective ideation and so-called ‘objective’ context. Many little post-equine philosophers have rightly challenged this compartmentalized view, but the Pony/Accessories paradigm offers a rather nice model for isolating a subjective notion of subjectivity itself, as demarcated, for instance, from the My Little Pony Rainbow Corral playset.

Let us not for a minute neglect that fateful modification ‘my little’ in which, firstly, ownership and, then, diminishment are asserted — which purposefully counterpoises egotism (the appropriation of Other) with an implied lacking or insufficiency (little being less than that which is regarded as the normative manifestation of a fixed– or central — ideation); My Little Pony is therefore defined by its belongingness to or of me (or as an accessory to a grounded a priori self, which is both apart from and the cipher which enters into the strategy of poniness on my behalf) and by its devaluation according to an acknowledged standard inherited by the self from the obscure collaboration of accessory identity (or ‘Otherness’). Thus, the tension which is essential to the MLP claim to existence (or, non-ontologically, to ‘mere’ expression) always already threatens to overcome and undermine the very motivations of that claim, thereby alluding to the futility of possession and the frustrated drive aspiring to transcendent satiation.

Massive bonus points if you can comment in the same style and refute/support the arguments presented!

OK so some of this is a little adult but I figured my fellow pony fans would appreciate this. From the Mommy With a Penis blog. Younger fans, don’t read it, OK?

Lately my daughter is gaga obsessed with My Little Pony. For you neophytes, there isn’t just one little pony like the singular title offers. There are many. And they are all girl ponies, not a steed in the stable. Actually, there are no stables. Come to think of it, they are very non horselike, these ponies. They are the color of fruit sherbet and are always prepping for some gala at Celebration Castle. Maxie has only three of their books and in each of them a major festivity is taking place. One book is about a golden egg hunt, another is about a royal costume party, and the last is the ultimate tea party.

I bring up the ponies because along with their lives of party throwing leisure, they have outlandish names. I can barely turn a page of the book without Maxie pointing to each pony and labeling them. Crazy insidious names like Sunny Daze, Twinkle Twirl, Pinky Pie (which sound like the newest designer drugs) are all part of this equine fantasy. And each pony has a tattoo on her haunch. Sparkleworks has a mini fireworks display, Meadowbrook a dragonfly, Wisteria a sprig of wisteria, etc. My favorite pony has four leaf clovers on her haunch…why Serendipity, of course.

Last night, while I was reading Pony Party, for the second time, I had this sudden image. A grouchy group of elderly people sitting around a table, smoking menthols, hopped up on pain killers, thinking up all these crazy ass pony names.

OLD FART #1: I like Minty.

OLD FART #2: Minty? What the hell kind of name is Minty?

OLD FART #1: My Ben Gay is minty. And I like Ben Gay.

OLD FART #2: Fine. I’ll let you have Minty, as idiotic as that sounds, if you let me call a pony Dazzle Surprise.

OLD FART #1: Sound like a big sissy to me, but okay. Let’s shake on it.

OLD FART #2: Can’t reach across the table. Just put your dentures back in and call it a deal.

And I bet I’m not far off on how the My Little Pony names are created. And it’s probably similar with the name generators dudes. Might not be the same group of people. Instead of old farts, the name generators might be just out of college pimply, but it’s the same concept. Name by committee.